


in the aftermath of this broken glass

by roseandsangria



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Canon, boy you know they have nightmares like crazy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 16:15:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20585354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandsangria/pseuds/roseandsangria
Summary: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny reflect on their nightmares. (Or, a snapshot of life after they return.)





	in the aftermath of this broken glass

They all have nightmares. There are so many things—colors, shapes, sounds, any of it—that trigger a reaction in them that it’s nigh on impossible to prevent. 

Violet thinks she’s begun to find a pattern in it, though. Finding a pattern is positive, it’s a first step. She is learning to be okay with small steps. 

When she feels helpless, her dreams are of scratchy fabrics, crows cawing disapprovingly, file cabinets, and stilettos clacking along tile. When she is hopeless, her dreams are icy. There is cold metal cutting into her shoulder, spoons full of cold soup, cold brick pressing into her back. When she feels out of control, it is solely sensation: falling in darkness, rushing through hallways immobile and dizzy, caravans plummeting down mountains. She feels like she can’t breathe.

But always, always, there are white dresses, white coats, and the scent of smoke. She never escapes those.

Klaus’s nightmares leave him angry, and Violet knows when he wakes from them. She hears him pacing, hears the muffled profanities. He doesn’t speak about them when the sun rises, and Violet doesn’t push.

Sunny’s nightmares are rare. She is painfully thankful for this. But when Sunny awakens with a scream, Klaus and she both come running. They have it down to a science: Klaus snatches Sunny up into his arms, carries her out of the room to soothe her.

Violet is left with little Beatrice, young enough to be startled into crying by Sunny’s scream. There is nothing more steadying than the weight of Beatrice in her arms, toddler-heavy and warm. She sings to her, songs she remembers from her mother, and she always feels closest to her mother when she’s taking care of Beatrice.

When Klaus returns with a soothed Sunny, Violet deposits Bea back into her bed, a new upgrade from the crib Violet had built. Together, Klaus and Violet put Sunny back to bed, with soothing goodnights and I-love-yous and you’re-safe-I-promises, and she sinks into sleep too after Violet presses a kiss to her forehead.

Violet takes care never to verbalize her nightmares. She hides them from both Klaus, who checks in on her the mornings after he has a nightmare of his own, and Sunny, who watches her with a discerning eye as she helps prepare breakfast. Instead, she ruminates on them, writes them down and hopes she can understand how to fix it.

*

Klaus is angry with a lot of things. Given the ample amount of time the Baudelaires now have, endless hours and days stretching out before them, no longer constrained by the looming presence of Olaf and sugar bowls and mushrooms, he has time to think about it. He has time to understand why he’s angry.

He is angry with his parents. His mother, graceful and extroverted, and a liar and a thief and maybe a murderer. His father, gentle and witty, and a liar and a thief and maybe a murderer. They hid so many things from him and his sisters. If they had told their children everything earlier, maybe they would have stood a better chance. If they had done things differently, maybe there would be no need for the Baudelaire children to stand a chance.

He is angry with the people who should have helped them. These number too many to count. Bankers and villagers and judges and hotel guests. Villainous or not, they were children. Sunny was a baby. They shouldn’t have had to go through that on their own. 

But he is most furious with himself. He is furious that he let so many things happen. He stood by and watched a villainous man try to marry his older sister. He just watched and only through her smarts, she stopped it. He watched her protect her younger siblings and sacrifice herself for it. She could have died. He watched his baby sister be hoisted in a cage, taken away from him in a car, separated by a helmet. He watched her struggle for breath. She would have died.

He could have done so much better.

Klaus has nightmares. They are infuriating; they leave him struggling to catch his breath with the intensity of them. He wakes with a shout and fixates on the images that linger in his mind. They are not always the same; yes, they are often of his sisters, but they are of tattoos and mushrooms, books and clay-covered feet, snakes and triangle glasses.

There is always something he misses in his nightmares, something he should have done better, something he could have realized. He hopes the girls, Violet in the room across the hall, Bea and Sunny next door to her, don’t wake up. He shoves it down, tries to do better. He writes down the dreams instead of talking about it, reflecting on them and hoping he can find a pattern.

*

Sunny is turning seven, and she isn’t certain if she’s still a young girl or just a girl now. She thinks seven might be the deciding age.

She also doesn’t remember things she thinks she should. For an ordinary young girl, there would be no expectation of memory, but Sunny has been told by her siblings again and again that she’s no ordinary girl. She helped. She did good, even when she was understood only by her siblings.

But her early memories—particularly of her parents, and the home they lived in before it burnt down—are hazy at best now. She remembers the strong slope of her father’s nose and his warm chest when he cradled her, and the slant of her mother’s smile and the way she would dress up in elaborate clothes. She can’t remember what they sounded like, can’t piece together their faces completely.

Sunny doesn’t remember much about the early horrors. It is mostly feeling for her. She remembers being hoisted up in a tower, but she doesn’t remember the way the metal would’ve pressed into her skin, the way she never slept more than a few minutes at a time. She remembers the feeling: the sheer terror of it. That feeling was constant for a long time, with only brief reprieves. She remembers how anxious her siblings were, how bravely they tried to hide it from her, and she wishes fervently that she could’ve been older, to be more of a help and less of a burden.

She doesn’t tell Violet or Klaus about this, of course, because she knows they’re struggling more than her. Klaus wakes up angry in the night with a curse, and some nights, when Sunny listens very close, she hears Violet wake up, gasping for air. She doesn’t mention them, because she knows both would deny it.

Sunny wishes she remembered everything. But maybe she doesn’t, because that might mean she would have more nightmares, nightmares like Violet and Klaus.

She has enough already. She is forced awake from them when her brain refuses to allow them to continue, but the feelings are so overwhelming, she can’t help but shriek. Both come, always come to protect her and Bea, and she is grateful.

When Klaus soothes her tears away, she tells him about how terrifying it felt. He nods, tells her he understands, and he’s proud of her for telling him about them. Klaus talks about how they came to her rescue whenever she was trapped, how there’s no need to fear anything or anyone anymore because they made it out. 

When Klaus and Violet both put her back to sleep, Sunny is drowsy again, filled to the brim with the promises and love given to her. She always falls asleep while they are still in the room.

It makes her feel better, to talk about it. She isn’t big enough to write her dreams down instead of talking it out, but maybe it’s a good thing that she talks about them instead. She is doing better. The dreams come less often.

Maybe forgetting is accepting, maybe it’s growing up, and maybe it’s progress.

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to get my voice down for these #traumatized children. Title from "Leader of the Landslide" by the Lumineers.


End file.
